Morris Jeff board considers charter amendments

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The governance committee for the Morris Jeff Community School board of directors will start looking at the nonprofit’s bylaws and charter this year for possible amendments, board Vice President Aesha Rasheed said during a meeting Thursday.

Rasheed suggested taking a look over the three years of school policies and gathering all the documents the school already has so the governance committee can ask what, if anything, needs to be adjusted.

Among the questions Rasheed proposed asking are:

“Is there anything we need to amend? Anything that’s no longer functional, or do we need to do something different?”

The main goal was for the governance committee to come up with a process by which the board reviews key policies, Rasheed added. At the meeting Thursday, board members voted to gather key documents for the committee to look over.

Rasheed also said that the board should chime in about what potential future bylaws should look like during the next board retreat. At that point, new board members would be able to get to know the school a little better, Rasheed said.

“New board members said they would benefit from an orientation that covers school history and function,” the minutes from the governance committee said.

The date of the board retreat hasn’t been announced yet.

During the meeting, Principal Patricia Perkins reminded the board that the charter would be up for review in the next couple of years, and that the board should make sure the school is in compliance before the review process happened.

Some changes that could me made to the charter might have to be approved by state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, she added.

“We’ll be scrutinized over the next couple of years, a little bit more than usual,” Perkins said.

A financial update given at the meeting showed that the school ended August with a net loss of about $20,000, which Director of Finance and Operations Jared Frank attributed mostly to back-to-school costs. The school anticipates the net income for the total 2013-14 budget to be about $21,600.

Della Hasselle, a freelance journalist and producer, reports environmental and criminal justice stories for The Lens. A graduate of Benjamin Franklin High School and the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, Hasselle lived in New York for 10 years. While up north, she produced and anchored news segments, wrote feature stories and reported breaking news for DNAinfo.com, a hyperlocal news site. Before that, she worked at the New York Daily News. She obtained her master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She can be reached at (917) 304-6121.

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